Ground Floor: I haven't read every day's report of the DCC/Fyffes battle entertaining the masses at the High Court because, quite frankly, you can have too much of a legal argument.

But I was drawn in by the evidence of Terence O'Rourke, a partner in KPMG, when he informed the court last week that the information which Jim Flavin had on Fyffes' trading conditions would have been hard for the market to interpret and that it would have caused "panic" if it had become common knowledge.

The market, of course, is made up primarily of professional investors most of whom are highly paid for their ability to interpret market information and almost all of whom have lived through many a market panic before.

As regular readers know, my own market days were spent in the esoteric world of foreign exchange and bond trading, so I never really broke bread with the equity honchos. But I can't see them being any less able to interpret information than my bond or forex colleagues.

And the interpretation that equity traders must surely make is that if a company tells you that it's expecting a year of further growth in December, but if it subsequently realises that it won't achieve its targets, then the share price is currently overvalued.

Most investors will then make a decision to sell the shares. Naturally, at that point, the share price will go down.

It's interesting that this is painted as a doomsday scenario in the High Court. Of course, a falling share price, for whatever reason, is always portrayed gloomily. Every day, business leaders struggle to maintain share prices even when they know that they're overvalued because to see slippage in the price is to admit that you've got it wrong somewhere along the line. Naturally, however, as soon as investors realise that a particular share is valued on the basis of results which are unattainable and that the price should therefore be lower, they all try to sell at the same time.

This is not exactly panic.

This is actually quite rational. Not great for the company concerned, of course, and not great for the institutional investor who knows that he or she will be lucky to get a buyer at the kind of price that won't have people questioning their judgement, but it's part and parcel of the cut and thrust of being quoted on the stock exchange.

What does happen, of course, is that the investors get pretty peeved about the whole debacle. After all, they've been loading up on shares because they think that they're on to a good thing.

Finding that they're not tends to ruin many a morning meeting. And the often cosy relationship between investor and the company in which they've invested can be somewhat changed.

Institutional investors have relationships with companies of which the punter in the street can only dream. They visit their factories and warehouses. They attend specialised presentations.

And why shouldn't they?

They own part of the company. They're entitled to know what is going on.

Mr O'Rourke also told the High Court that the markets "hate confusion". He's right there. They absolutely do.

But the release of information which shows that a company is not about to meet targets doesn't cause confusion.

It causes shareholders to swear loudly and look for their broker. There is no confusion involved. Just rage.

Sometimes I can't help feeling that big business is all about making the art of something simple appear to be extremely complicated. And then you call in the lawyers. Which brings things to an entirely new level of complexity altogether.

* * * * *

The departure of Carly Fiorina from the board of Hewlett-Packard was not a complicated affair. Again, regular readers will know that I've followed Carly's career with interest being (naturally) biased towards the sisterhood when it comes to achieving in the business arena. Carly's big gamble was in merging HP with Compaq - a deal which caused everyone concerned many sleepless nights as Walter Hewlett, the son of the HP's founder, was dead set against it.

He felt that the merger would see HP competing in the thin-margin PC business and that it wouldn't be as profitable as they'd hoped. HP did indeed beef up its computer sales but the profits (as Walter predicted) were slim.

The main problem is that most investors and analysts think that the merged company is too big. Naturally, everyone who was behind the merger disagrees which is not entirely unexpected given the effort they made to get it through. I'm sure Carly has spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that her grand design has turned out to be a grand disaster.

So many things can go wrong in business. No matter how hard you work and how much thought you put into a strategy, it can still go pear-shaped. Obviously, though, for Carly there's the super-duper compensation package to keep the wolf from the door. Her severance package is worth about $21 million (€16 million ) and, canny Carly, most of it is, apparently, cash.

Meantime, though, another woman has become the non-executive chairman. Patricia Dunn was severely critical of Fiorina in a report which she presented to the board. Dunn was formerly chief executive of Barclay's Global Investors and has been on the board of HP since 1998.

HP is, apparently, happy that its new public face is less of a personal celebrity than Fiorina, who was a regular on TV talk shows and the star of HP's own ad campaign.

The knives are out for Carly. She was hailed as the golden girl five years ago when she stepped into the high-heeled shoes of the CEO position.

Once the HP share price started to slide, the writing was on the wall. Now they're calling her inept and unfocused. It's a cut-throat world out there, but at least Carly has managed to stay out of the courts!

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